Thursday, May 3, 2007 - Contemplating- On standards of resilience of the Y generation :

The recent resilience workshop held in school on 9th April has left several lessons deep-rooted into my heart and what I am about to share in this post are my reflections and learning points gained from this meaningful seminar.

Resilience is defined as the abiity to recover quickly from change or misfortune; or simply, buoyancy.

As we all know, life is not a bed of roses. In certain points of our lives, we face failures, unsurmountable problems, domestic woes and conflicts at work. How do we cope with these difficulties? Resilience teaches us to be flexible and control our emotions while tackling with issues. It also builds our determination and will through events that impede us from reaching the outcomes we desire.

In today’s society, I recognise that the Y generation has become more vulnerable and helpless to failures. What is it that contributes to this phenomenon? I believe that the entry of rising number of parents into the workforce has a significant part to play in the problem. When children comes home from school, their parents are busy toiling at their offices. When their exhausted parents return home from work, all worn-out and weary, the childen would be fast asleep in the comfort of the own bedrooms. There is hardly any interaction between parents and their offsprings. Even during weekends, parents are still not released by the tight grip of work shedule. Hence, the youngsters today do not share their problems to their parents. They bottle their feelings up, shut themselves out from care of their parents if any, and end up suffering the pain themselves. Problems which remain unsolved accumulate till the youths simply could not take it and break down.

Another reason may be parenting may fall short at home where parents themselves do not teach their children about being strong when facing adversities and to be independent. Instead, they carry the burden of solving their children’s problems. When we read the daily papers, we can easily find articles of youths taking their own lives because they did not have the courage to admit their wrong-doings, or having experienced a failure in a local examination, or they lacked the confidence in juggling schoolwork with family break-ups. All these stressful events has taken a toll on the youth’s frame of mind. It all voices down to resilience.

We all must have resilience so that we could stand tall and not cower away when meeting difficulties. Resilience can be displayed a easily as this; when someone does badly in his exams, he thinks through the reasons that could have contributed to his failure like poor revision methods or lack of time managability, and then think of solutions which would help him succeed like signing up for workshops which would improve these skills that he lacks.

When we feel like giving up, negative thoughts would flood our minds, causing us feel that there is no way out, we should accept our fate. However, I beg to differ. We have the power to fight back. We can counter-attack these thoughts by thinking of positive things that we actually can do. This is a demonstration of resilience too.

Resilience is crucial, especially when we step into the workforce, which is a more confusing world than we, the Y generation is in right now. Resilience would come into real use in future, hence we must practise it from a young age so that we would be able to deal with any kind of problems. It enables us to develop robustness and strength. Resilience is nurtured; we are not born with it.

Through resilience, I am sure the youths today, like me, can discover love in whatever they are doing. Through resilience, we could experience the best of things and challenge ourselves against the things we think is impossible!

The future ain't what it used to be. hugged teddy at 10:00 PM